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The Black Friday silliness is nearly over and I have spent… nothing at all. I have ignored it completely and feel much better for it. I haven’t even watched the videos of people squabbling over last year’s technology so the shops get space for Christmas stock of this year’s stuff. Which I also will not buy. It’s going to be a difficult Christmas for those who want to buy me presents because beyond whisky and tobacco, there is nothing left that I want.

I have, however, watched the day’s silliness off and on. There is a lot of it now. The BBC is horrified to find that mince pies contain traces of alcohol. That’s not the silliest part of the article though – that prize goes to Asda’s checkout staff for demanding ID for the sale of a box of mince pies. What goes through their minds? Not much…

Upping the silliness a notch (oh this is just getting started), a mother has called for ‘Sleeping Beauty’ to be age restricted so younger kids can’t read it. Why? Because the sleeping princess does not give consent to be kissed. That, apparently, is what causes men to become rapists in later life.Therefore Hansel and Gretel turns old ladies into cannibals and children into murderers while Goldilocks encourages home invasion, food theft and bed-hopping in young girls.

The comments on the article are worth reading. In particular, the book about a God who impregnates a virgin while she sleeps – without her consent. They haven’t banned the Bible yet, but it’s coming.

Although there might not be any need. The Church of Sweden is no longer referring to the ‘Lord’ God because that assumes he is male. Well, all through the Bible, references to God refer to ‘he’ or ‘him’ and not ‘xe, xim’ or any other recently made up pronoun. The Bible also makes the gender issue very clear indeed. Man and woman. There is no Book of Genders – and you’d need a whole damn book these days, with daily updates as the loonies think up new things to call themselves.

One thing’s for sure, I’m not leaving any pet of mine alone with someone calling themselves ‘pansexual’. There is now even pressure to recognise paedos as a legitimate sexual orientation. That’s going to be a ‘no’ from me on that one.

You know, I think if God was being ‘misgendered’ (now a sacking offence in many places) all this time, xe’d have said something. I also think we might soon see some evidence for the existence of God when the Church of Sweden gets obliterated by multiple, simultaneous lightning strikes. If you believe in the existence of a deity as powerful as that, one thing you definitely avoid doing is pissing him off.

Well it’s Sweden. God could just let Islam finish destroying it. I picture him turning to Allah and saying ‘You can have that place, mate. I don’t want it any more.’ Maybe he already has…

Oh, wait until the Politically Correct start insisting Allah might be transgender. That would be a day to remember.

Meanwhile Brexit continues to not happen. The EU’s latest bargaining chip is to deny the UK an entry into the European City of Culture self-congratulatory waste of time and money. If I were sat at that negotiating table, my response would have been an eyeroll, a sarcasm-drenched ‘Oh I am quaking’ and a request that they go away and find some adults we can negotiate with. Which, I suppose, is why I’ll never be called into the field of diplomacy.

I hope they eject us from the Eurovision terrible song contest too. Nobody will dare vote for us after Brexit anyway. Except maybe Poland, Hungary etc. They might give us top marks just to poke their EU dictators in the eye.

Who the hell cares about getting a City of Culture in 2023? It doesn’t mean a damn thing and there’s a good chance there’ll be no EU by then anyway. It’s falling apart like rice-paper in the rain.

It’s not the only thing that’s falling apart. The anti-vapers are on increasingly shaky ground and the Church of Climatology is on thinner ice than even they predicted. The previously robust LGBT movement has now fragmented into a thousand different groups because of the ridiculous proliferation of imaginary genders. There are gender identities that have one person in them now.

There are men pretending to be women but who want to keep their danglies. It’s as if pantomime season has escaped onto the streets. Widow Twanky wants to use the same changing rooms as teenage girls and we’re supposed to regard that as normal. These dames have even labelled actual transsexuals as ‘transcum’ because they underwent the horrors of surgery to prove they were serious, and weren’t just trying to ogle young girls in underwear.

The Pope welcomes the invasion of radical Islam even though he is number one on their list of people to behead. What the hell is in those incense burners now?

The EU is dictating to Austria about the form its new government should take. Austria looks like giving them a resounding ‘git tae fuck’ (every government needs a Glaswegian spokesman) as does Hungary etc. over the EU insistence they fill their countries with people who hate them.

There are people on Twitter shouting ‘Kill all white people’ and some of the ones shouting are white. Turkeys demanding an extra Christmas every year. Or maybe an extra Thanksgiving, but that is now racist, as is the poppy of Remembrance Day. I bought two this year because of that and because anti-white racism is now so blatant that even Government departments can post job adverts with ‘no whites’ on them. Try posting any job ad with ‘no blacks’ on it and see what happens.

I haven’t bothered with Facebook much for a long time. It’s rapidly becoming a dictatorship and Twitter is going the same way. Some ‘endorsed’ members (the blue tick is an endorsement of their views by Twitter now, not just a verified identity, because they are taking that verification away from people they don’t agree with) preach violence and death and if they are anti-white, that’s fine.

I’ve now set up an account on gab.ai ready for the day Twitter feels I am ‘threatening their safe space’ or some such crap. Anyone can join there, anyone at all. It’s in its infancy but it’s how Twitter used to be, with no sides taken and nobody banned just for disagreeing. If it eventually turns into another Totalitarian Twitter there will be a new one to follow it.

I still have to fill out my tax return and I really don’t want to. I’ll have to give them money this time and when I see what they do with it, I honestly don’t want to feel responsible for rte shit they produce. Tessie Maybe was a crap Home Secretary and is an appallingly weak Prime Monster. She only won because the alternative was so much worse.

I’d rather have John Major back. Yeah, she’s that bad.

Well, times are going to get interesting and somewhat violent in the near future. I heard today that in Sweden, they have set fire to nine immigrant housing places but I can’t be sure if that’s true yet. I don’t know of any completely reliable news source any more. The backlash, if it hasn’t started already, is inevitable though.

Only the politicians and the politically correct will be surprised. The rest of us will just shrug and say ‘Yeah. Told you.’

Minimum unit pricing for alcohol has returned, this time it’s the ridiculous morons in the Welsh ‘parliament’ doing it. I notice they have now reduced your alcohol allowance to 14 units a week with no reasoning nor justification. Hah! 14 units? I never start writing until I’m well past that.

As the comments below the article point out, the Welsh will simply go to England to buy booze, and those on or close to the border will probably just do their weekly shopping over there too. Nice dent in the Welsh economy there, added to this latest slapdown on the tourist trade.

There’s another aspect though. Alcohol is incredibly easy to make. You can make beer or (especially) wine out of just about anything. As long as it contains sugar, it will ferment. No controls, no regulations, no limit on ABV beyond what your yeast can tolerate – and yeast can be gradually selected for the most alcohol tolerant variety so will produce stronger booze with successive use.

Okay, I have an unfair advantage here, being a microbiologist who has worked with all kinds of fermentations and with a lab full of fermentation equipment but trust me, you can do it with plastic buckets and demijohns.

Banana wine is very nice and really potent. As bananas ripen, the starch in them breaks down into sugars so they get sweeter and also easier to ferment. What you want are the really ripe ones where the skin is blackening and you know you’ll get those at a heavy discount in pretty much any shop that sells bananas.

The fermenting stuff looks horrible but once it’s finished and cleared it’s a yellowish whisky-like colour. It looks and tastes lovely and it should be approached with caution. It turns out very potent indeed. Regulations? Control? Units? Nobody cares.

I have a bottle of banana wine. Some friends of mine made it. They live in Wales and they make wine out of pretty much anything at all. They have demijohns and bottles galore and they’ve given away some but never thought of selling it. The new anti-drink laws could turn out profitable for them and others like them. Including the unscrupulous who will just add rubbing alcohol to fruit juices with no concern as to the horrible consequences on their customers. Remember, when you are blind and getting your stomach pumped, Public Health Puritanism made that happen.

Of course, with supermarkets selling booze ‘cheaper than water’ (this has never actually happened outside the demented heads of the Public Health Puritans) few people will bother going to all that trouble. They’d rather just get a few cans in to watch a film on a Friday night.

Put up the price though, and suddenly homebrew isn’t too much bother at all. It’s already started in Scotland, where the Spiteful Nannying Puritans have been in power for some time. I see demijohns appear in second hand shops at £8 a pop and they don’t hang around long.

I don’t need them of course, I have a lab full of 5-litre conical flasks…

Out here in the countryside I have access to wild raspberries and blackberries, slashing back the garden has revealed, so far, three apple trees and three crabapple trees. Several large elder trees. I have gooseberries and strawberries and… two well established grapevines in a greenhouse, ready for harvesting. A third vine might start producing next year.

Raw materials needn’t cost a penny. I have all the equipment, and none of it needs to be complex. I do have four continuous culture vessels that could be turned into continuous beer/wine producers with a little adjustment. That won’t be hard since I built them from scratch anyway.

None of it is regulated by anyone other than me. None of the bottles will have any information concerning units or alcohol content or the ‘no fat birds’ sticker. I might put ‘please drink irresponsibly’ on them for fun. Why not? I live in Brewdog country here. Sorry, not sorry.

As for beer, well I live on a farm that grows barley. I’m sure I could get a couple of shovelfuls for washing the farmer’s car or something similar. I just need to plant some hops, I have room for a small malting house (it’s not as complex as you’d think) and then the beer is free too. It’s also totally devoid of any limits on ABV, other than what I can train the yeast to tolerate.

I made beer in the 1980s as a student. I supplied a barrel at a party and heard slurred complaints and talk of ‘rocket fuel’ and ‘what the hell have you made?’. That wasn’t even the nettle beer incident (which happened only once) where I used nettles that had grown a bit too much. You’re only supposed to use the very young ones that haven’t yet developed stinging cells. It tasted good although it took a day or so to get the feeling back in your tongue.

Then there was tea wine which was awful but freeze-distilled into tea brandy was actually pretty good. Never bothered to do it again, it wasn’t that fantastic.

In the 1980s there were specialised homebrew shops. Supermarkets sold homebrew kits. Then they all vanished. Now there are shops selling homebrew stuff again. Only a matter of time before the specialist shops reappear.

Beyond that is the random homebrew. Booze made from anything that ferments. It’s happened before and it’s making a big comeback now.

No regulations, no limits. Thanks to the idiots in charge. At least I can honestly say I didn’t vote for them. Can you?

First of all, they are not supposed to be competing with private companies. They, like most modern ‘charities’, are funded by Government to give Government new ways to be oppressive, totalitarian bastards.

Secondly, I do not care how much money any private company spends on advertising. It’s not my money, never was and never will be. It’s not being paid for by squeezing taxes out of the rest of us. If you buy their products then you’re adding to their profits but that is entirely your choice.

Nobody is forced to buy any of those products. They do not come round and force-feed you chicken nuggets and canned spaghetti hoops then rifle through your pockets for money. They simply make products available for those who want them. Advertising is their way of telling us all that the product is available. You can ignore ads, you know. Only a gullible idiot would consider advertising as any kind of ‘forcing’.

Antifat, on the other hand, get their money from Government which takes it from us by force. If you don’t hand over a chunk of the money you worked for to a bunch of self-important entitled suits in Wastemonster, they will put you in jail and take the money anyway,

That is why I do not care at all about the £143 million spent by food companies on advertising. They aren’t making me contribute a penny towards it. I care a hell of a lot about the £5.2 million wasted on keeping jumped-up prodnoses in a cushy job because I am forced to contribute to that.

It annoys me immensely and I’m not even overweight. It annoys me because it’s another arm of the Smoker Hate and Booze Hate that I’ve also been forced into contributing to.

There are already strict rules on advertising food ‘to children’ (who have limited to zero means of buying any of it) and yet it’s never enough, is it? As with all the other Puritans we pay for, there’s always another increment, another slice of the salami. And now they will tie in nicely with Tessie Maybe’s long-held desire to control the Internet harder than China does.

All this crap has to go. We’d pay less tax and the NHS would have more funds if all this shit were swept away.

And we could have a bag of chips without watching out for the prodnoses.

Busy here at the moment. Today was the nicest day since about June and I’m hoping the ground will dry out enough to finish the grass and re-do the weeding. I have a similar problem to the farmer who owns this farm – it gets almost dry, and then it rains again. On the farm, harvesting has been frantic and often continuing into darkness when weather allows. The same goes for baling the straw. Today though, it looked like this –

I didn’t even have to photoshop the blue sky in, like you usually have to with Scottish photos. I did crop out the thunderclouds…

The farm here has no livestock, it’s all wheat and barley. Barley – all grain – prices are likely to be high this year because a wet harvest means paying more to get the grain dried, but as most of the barley goes to whisky distilleries, they can afford it. The rest gets made into beer.

The wheat is made into flour to make bread, butteries and batter for deep frying. Yeah. Scotland takes your green vegetarian crops and says ‘fuck you pal, we’ll use it to make booze, flat rolls made of fat and deep fried lard’.

I expect to soon be in possession of a grass blade for my scythe. I bought the ditch blade first because I mostly use it in the woods but the mowers can’t cope with long wet grass. The scythe doesn’t care how wet the grass is, it reaps it anyway, But the ditch blade is not designed for lawns so I ordered a grass blade. Basically it’s a 75 cm long razor that I attach to the end of a stick and swing around in the garden. Best keep the dog indoors, she already has short enough legs. I also expect a monsoon as soon as it arrives but I’ll be out there with it, swingin’ in the rain. Like a herbicidal maniac.

It’s time for the quarterly author payments. A little more complex this time because there are more books than last time, but it’ll just take a day or so to sort it out. Better get used to that, there’ll be more books every time. Technically I shouldn’t count the ones I buy to send to authors as part of their contract, nor should I count the ones I buy to give away as advertising, but I’m not going to make it difficult for myself. Those count too.

Okay, finally, to the point.

I have watched with interest the sudden acceleration of the genderless agenda. It’s been ticking along for years now, with ‘I am gay, I am a rug muncher, I shag anyone, I am a woman who is really a dickless man’ and so on. It was harmless, it seemed, and sure, some people genuinely feel they should be the opposite gender to the one they were born with, Nothing wrong with that, it’s how they feel, no problem.

LGBT seemed like a harmless group to those of us (straight white males) who are excluded from every group anyway and who have to cringe while white girlie-men insist we deserve eradication while not taking the initiative themselves…

Now, the LGBT movement has developed its own alphabet and is LGBTZJYMTOLflippityfloppitythingywhatnot with more Q’s than have appeared in all the Bond films so far.

It includes ‘pansexual’ (as in ‘I fuck frogs and badgers’) and there is pressure to include paedos in that group because shagging infants is okay as long as you have a letter and a rainbow flag.

I should maybe mention that this is likely to offend. If it does, get over it or watch me not care. Seriously, it’s grow up time. You can throw all the abuse and death threats at me you want. I have spent time surviving homelessness, you want a fight? I remember how. You wasters have grown up in bubble wrap. The people I grew up around will kick your arse into hamburger.

Real LGBT people are getting the hell out of this crap now. Gay is not the same as paedo and not the same as pansexual. A man who likes men is not the same as a man who likes dogs or weasels or any kind of children.

I wonder if they include duck egg fuckers now? That would be P-squared, paedo pansexual…

Tickling trout, when I was younger, had a different meaning. You weren’t trying to give them an orgasm.

Lately it has become more sinister. Now we have ‘experts’ (the new word for ‘money driven idiot’) declaring that children have to be reassigned gender (expensive surgery and to hell with the consequences) just because they indulge in a bit of dress up.

I have worn a kilt. It’s a pretty decent skirt and doesn’t easily blow up to expose your bits. I found it quite a comfortable thing to wear. I hear John Lewis stores are no longer labelling clothes ‘for boys’ or ‘for girls’. Well, okay. I buy what I like to wear anyway and labels are for pigeons. I don’t want to be pigeonholed but I will be. I’ll be in the ‘scruffy bastard charity shop’ box.

I’m okay with that. You can pigeonhole me if you want. You can pretend I’m racist and misogynist and an actual demon just because I’m white and straight and non-religious and I’ll let you know if I ever start to care.

Okay, you’re a guy who prefers to go for the tradesmen’s entrance or a girl who prefers tribbing or a guy/girl who goes both ways or a man/woman who feels they should have been a woman/man… This is all fine with me. I don’t care. Go your own way. Live your life the way you want to. You only have one go at it. All you can do is try to get it right and that will never mean, to me, ‘do as you are told’. You are not free when someone else tells you how to live.

That attitude is going to get me banned from Twitter, Farcebok etc one day because the real ‘tolerance’ is not tolerated there.

We now have ‘experts’ talking about transgender children. They talk about an eight year old who was ‘assigned’ female at birth like someone ticked a form. We have more varieties of gender than Heinz had of beans.

There are two genders. Two. Male and female. Plug and socket. You can have as many varieties of ‘sexual preference’ as you like but that is not gender. Gay and lesbian animals exist. It does not change their gender. There are seals in the Antarctic who like to shag penguins. They are not a different gender. They are… probably Muslim.

Yeah, I’ve been expecting death threats from you buggers for a long time. That’s why I have certain things.

You are not assigned a gender at birth. Gender, one or the other, is decided when a sperm gets into the egg. X or Y are the only choices there.

Sexual preference is not gender.

Gender is male or female. Plug or socket. You can change gender these days surgically but it does not change your genes. You can be an XY woman or a XX man and if you are happy in that life then good for you. But your genetics have not changed.

X or Y are the only choices for gender. I fully expect YY males to appear in the future, and the feminists can imagine what a Hell that will unleash. No they can’t, but I can.

There are not multiple genders. Multiple sexualities,. yes, but including those which are illegal is not going to keep your core support,

I’m a white straight guy. I never knew it would make life so much easier.

The antismokers don’t care about health. They make vicious attacks on smokers and vapers and are trying to ban vaping (so far, they’ve succeeded in Australia, land of the most gullible politicians on the planet). They only care about control and money.

The tax take from the remaining villified smokers is immense. Some of it pays the antismoker wages. Neither they, nor the politicians, want you to give up smoking or switch to vaping. They just enjoy punishing you for it and charging you for the privilege of being a hated pariah.

Really, they have tried to claim that breathing steam is even more harmful than breathing smoke. The claims made about smoking causing everything from death to dandruff passed the absurdity horizon long ago. The claims of harm from vaping started inside that horizon and are well on the way to the stupidity singularity. Don’t for a moment imagine that any of this is being done for your benefit. It’s being done for theirs. You don’t matter at all.

Climatologists know the climate changes all the time. They’ve been at that scam for many years. When the climate was cooling in the seventies, we were warned about a coming ice age unless we cut our carbon emissions. Now the climate is warming up a bit, the planet will turn into Venus unless we cut our carbon emissions. Oh, and of course, we have to give them lots of money for their pet projects in order to save the world. People fall for this shit in droves. It’s why religion does so well – people just love a good Armageddon story. Especially when they believe they will be saved and we horrible proles will all die.

Now we have ‘gender fluidity’, a step on the way to gender neutrality all round. The medics are cashing in, as usual, using terms like ‘assigned female/male at birth’ rather than sticking to biological facts. Eight-year-olds are being targeted for ‘gender reassignment’ and why? Because it’s good for them? Hahahaha!

Because it makes money for those pushing this nonsense and, deeper, it furthers the Marxist equality agenda which is, of course, a total control agenda. You don’t even get to decide whether you are male or female. The State decides for you.

Soon babies will be surgically neutered at birth and assigned a gender when the State decides they have reached adulthood – and the way things are going that’ll be when you are about 30. Until then you will be neuter. There can be no sex discrimination if you don’t have one. It’s for your own good and you will be amazed at how many people will believe that.

Currently we have Antifa and the KKK in open war on the streets of America. Personally I’d tell the police to stay out of the way and let them wipe each other out. Both claim to know the best way to run American society and both would create a police state – just with different targets. America has experienced McCarthyism and I bet most people don’t want it back.

None of these groups care about you. The people don’t matter at all. They just want to be in control and they want you to pay for it.

Governments do not serve the people any more. Anywhere. In some places, they never did but at least they were open about it. Now there is no government anywhere that exists for any other reason than to control their people and take money from them.

One day I will be diagnosed with something that will kill me. Or maybe not, maybe I’ll be flattened by a bus or a meteor or blown up by a peaceful religion or stabbed to death in the name of a god of love. But, hopefully, I’ll have a diagnosis telling me I have weeks or months to live.

You will not get me into a hospital. I will smoke everything I can find and drink so much I’d be dead three days before even I noticed. There’ll be no need to embalm me, my body will last longer than Babylonian pickles. I will try class A drugs if I can get hold of any. I never have yet.

If I am told I am in my last months I am going to try everything I can in those months. I will not be tied down in a hospital with my tobacco placed just out of reach because ‘it’s bad for me’. That is beyond cruel. That is actually evil.

It has reached the stage where if anyone says ‘it’s for your benefit’ I automatically look for how they will benefit.

They showed volunteers a series of images, just symbols, but some symbols gave them an electric shock when displayed. The volunteers soon learned to anticipate the shock when the symbol appeared. So far, so Pavlovian. Nothing contentious there.

So now they have a group with a ‘learned fear response’. This, they seem to believe, is a bad thing. It’s the response that stops you poking your finger into a flame a second time. The response that makes you steer well clear of tigers and other things that might eat you. Yet, to these scientists, being afraid of something that hurts is a bad thing.

They then showed the volunteers the same symbols but without the electric shocks and with reassurances that ‘all is well’, The smokers tended to flinch at the symbols anyway, despite the reassurances.

Now, from this they conclude that smoking is bad because smokers don’t just accept the reassurances. Smoking, they say, inhibits your ability to suppress a fear response.

Hypothetical stiuation – some bearded loony is running at you with a machete shouting ‘Allahu akbar but it’s okay, I’m from the religion of peace’. Is it better to suppress your fear response because of reassuring words, or is if better to run like buggery and let the idiot who believes the words get sliced into halal bacon?

I’m a smoker. I’ll hang on to my learned fear response, thank you very much.

The ‘fear response’ is not the same thing as PTSD. That’s where they are making their fundamental error. PTSD needs a cure. It’s debilitating. The fear response does not need a cure. It’s a normal and natural part of being a human. In fact, any animal. Suppressing the fear response means developing people who will stick their finger in the flame a second time and who will try to cuddle tigers.

I seem to recall reading about a condition – might be considered the opposite of PTSD – where people have no ability to feel fear and do not learn from being hurt. That’s a pretty dangerous condition to have. Should we all aspire to be so fearless that we will walk back into a burning house because we think we’ve left the gas on?

A big confounder in this whole experiment is that smokers have a ‘fear response’ to the entire medical profession that has been drummed into us over decades. We know they hate us – it’s not paranoia, they are in the news every day delighting in new ways to make our lives miserable. So when a doctor says ‘Now this time we won’t electrocute you’, the smoker is far less likely to believe it. Basically, medical profession, we don’t trust you, and you made that happen.

The nonsmoker has no such conditioned response. They don’t take their septic finger to the doctor knowing they will be nagged about how smoking causes septic fingers and be told a lot of lies about how they have to give up smoking or the antibiotics won’t work. The smoker forced to interact with the medical world now does so from an initial position of anxiety that is caused not by smoking, but by the incessant nagging.

The article goes on to bemoan how PTSD sufferers smoke much more than us laid back hippie layabout smokers, and calls for ‘interventions’ to stop them. Interventions to stop anyone in a job such as the military, fire service or police from smoking in case their smoking triggers PTSD.

Seriously.

They are claiming smoking causes PTSD. Not attending a crime scene where the walls are decorated with blood and three sets of intestines are tastefully arranged into a semblance of a Christmas tree. No, it’s smoking that gives you PTSD. Not combing through a burning building, knowing it might collapse at any moment just as you come face to face with a charred corpse. Not cowering under heavy shellfire and watching your best mate blown into a thousand pieces right in front of you. No, it’s the smoking we have to deal with.

Seriously. They want to stop soldiers smoking because that’s the biggest danger they face. They want to stop police officers smoking becasue being stabbed by a loony is not so bad, really. The best one is still the firemen. The ones who routinely venture into clouds of choking smoke and flame are not allowed to burn half a gram of leaves and inhale.

This piece of research clearly had the conclusion ‘smoking is bad’ prewritten. It does nothing to advance any kind of treatment for PTSD or anything else. The only thing it advances is the antismoking agenda. Soon you will not be allowed to join the police, military or fire brigade if you smoke.

As the experiment has shown, only those whose natural fear response can be easily overridden will be allowed into those professions. They are the ones who will take unnecessary risks that will put themselves and their colleagues in danger. The smoker who says ‘Whoa, hang on, if we do that we’ll probably die’ is to be banned from the professions altogether.

Military, fire service, police. Three professions where the alleged dangers of smoking are utterly trivial when set against the dangers they face every day. Yet here we have a piece of ‘research’ designed to eliminate smoking from those professions.

Revelation 13: 16-17: Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

I’m not religious, still. I’m not convinced of the existence of any God and yet, the Bible was written by some very interesting people. And, as a writer of scary stories, I have had occasion to dip into the Bible (as well as some *cough* ‘rival publications’ for fact-checking and inspiration). The Mark of the Beast is a big story plotline which nobody seriously thought would become reality.

And also here (another hat tip, this time to @Leahurst66) The last line of this one contains a typo –

“I want to be part of the future,” she laughs.

Surely she meant ‘furniture’. They hold parties where unchipped workers get to be assimilated for free. It’s not yet compulsory to be chipped to work there but it’s going to be damn inconvenient to be unchipped when the card readers start breaking down. Who wants to pay maintenance costs on obsolete equipment? There’s no need to ‘force’ compliance. Just make non-compliance a hassle.

These are all volunteers. They’ll be delighted with their new Borg implant that lets them open doors and operate vending machines. How long before there are doors that can only be opened by the chip? You don’t have the chip, you can’t go in there. How long before it’s simply too inconvenient to be unchipped? How long before it’s mandatory? How long before you can’t open your door or ride a bus or start your car without one? How long before resistance is genuinely futile?

Oh, the technology has been around for some time. Implanted chips are years old. Implants in pets are actually compulsory in many countries now, and you can already pay for stuff by tapping your credit card on the machine rather than going to all that hassle of slotting it in and pressing four buttons. I’m still a Luddite and use cash most of the time, and absolutely refuse to get involved with contactless when I use the card.

I can keep the cards in a screened wallet so they don’t get scanned by passing crooks, but what if it’s in your hand? Will we have to wear chain mail gloves?

Yes, people welcomed contactless technology and as I suggested at the time, if pressing four buttons is such a hassle, wouldn’t it be so much more convenient if you didn’t have to bother with the card? Why not have that contactless chip embedded in your hand? You can’t forget it or lose it and it’s unlikely to be stolen. You’d certainly notice if it was. I said at the time that it wouldn’t have to be mandatory. People will welcome such convenience.

Remember, a few years back, the calls to have children microchipped like pets so they could be traced if they went missing? Oh that met with absolute outrage! It died out and went quiet. Well it’s back now, except now they will get adults to demand them rather than force them on us all.

They could replace passports. Yes, you can be scanned remotely as you pass without even knowing your credentials are being checked. Isn’t that convenient? Any government authority can know where you are and who you’re with at a moment’s notice. Does that make you feel safe? I bet many people will answer ‘yes’ to that.

The amount of calories in your shopping could soon be displayed on your till receipt and from there it’s just a small step to a siren and red light announcing ‘too many calories!’ at the checkout. Most people will be shamed into buying fewer calories. Personally I’d see it as a challenge to set off that red light every single time.

Buying too much booze? Buying too many chocolate bars? Buying another can of fizz when you bought one only last week? Does it really sound so unlikely when even now, you buy something on Amazon and get related ads popping up on Facebook and other sites. Use your store card and they send you vouchers for money off stuff you buy. Oh yes, it’s all great until you start thinking about how much data is really stored about your life.

Your medical records can be stored on another chip. How would you sell that to people? Well, suppose you were in an accident or passed out on the street. If an ambulance crew could just scan you and get your records, it would save vital minutes and ensure they know what to treat you with right away. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Link it to your home Wifi and the medics can tell if you’re suddenly taken ill. They can also tell when you’re smoking, drinking, overeating…

All this, and the total removal of even the concept of gender, is already in Panoptica. The story I wonder about finishing – and wonder whether I should have written it at all. It seems to come true as I write it.

Although I didn’t have calorie counts on till receipts. There are no till receipts and your shopping is assembled for you depending on your State-defined dietary needs. That hasn’t happened in real life.